someone from East T imor?
At that time, they’d been refusing to interview T imorese
refugees in Lisbon and Australia, claiming—like the rest of the
mainstream media—that they had no access to them. I w as asked to
pay for plane tickets for some T imorese refugees in Lisbon to fly to
New York. But the Times still w ouldn’t talk to them.
On another occasion, I managed to get the Times to interview a
Portuguese priest, Father Leoneto do R ego, w ho had been living in
the mountains w ith the T imorese resistance and had been driven out
during the nearly genocidal campaign of 1978. T hat’s w hen Carter
increased the flow of w eapons to Indonesia. T he only reason they
didn’t murder Father Leoneto w as because he w as Portuguese.
He w as a very interesting man and a very credible w itness, a
classmate of the cardinal of Boston, pretty hard to disregard—but
nobody w ould talk to him. Finally I got the Times to interview him.
T he article that resulted, by Kathleen Teltsch, w as an utter
disgrace. It said almost nothing about w hat w as happening: there w as
one line that said something like, Things aren’t nice in Timor. I
suspect the badness of that article must have been w hat induced the
Times’ editors to run their first serious editorial on the issue.
Meanw hile, I w as trying to get the Boston Globe to cover the
story. T hey w ere just publishing State Department handouts and
apologetics from Indonesian generals. T hey offered to let me w rite
an op-ed, but I said, No, I don’t want to write an op-ed. I want one
of your reporters to look into it.
I finally got them to agree to look at the facts, but they didn’t take
them too seriously. Instead of putting an international reporter on
the story, they gave it to a local reporter, R obert Levey.
Fortunately, he w as extremely good.
We helped him w ith some leads, and he picked up the ball and ran
w ith it. Somebody in the State Department leaked him a transcript
of the actual New York Times interview w ith Father Leoneto,
w hich w as very pow erful and said extremely important things. His
article w as the best story on East T imor that had appeared in the
American press.
All of this w as in 1979 and early 1980. Before that, suppression
of the East T imor issue had been total in the U S press, and I mean
total; w hen the atrocities peaked in 1978, there w ere literally no
stories.